Wet Landings, Fruit Smoothies, and Patient Killers

Jackie is clipped on and ready to fly 400 meters through the jungle, 50 meters above the ravine, and a leather cable grip to slow her landing at the next platform. Enlarge photo

Keeping older kids happy on vacation is pretty easy in zippy Costa Rica. Here Andy enjoys a blitz tour of a plush jungle canopy. Enlarge photo

Walking through the tropical rainforest, I was mesmerized by vertical ropes thick and thin. It was a fecund free-for-all, with a humid scribble of plants and trees all reaching both high for the sun and low for the nutrients.

I couldn’t stop thinking of the whole thing powered by leafy solar panels as the tip-top of just about everything living jockeyed for a place in the sun. While the canopy is a commotion of God’s solar panels, the ground level is a greedy scramble for nutrients, with lots of clever ways for plants and trees to catch and funnel detritus into their roots.

The strangler fig — an impressively patient killer — winds like some Boy Scout decoration in a perfect spiral up a huge tree. Someday the host tree will be gone and the dainty, innocuous-looking fig vine will be a fat tree itself — with a hollow interior. Here in the jungle, eventually everything eats everything.

I asked my friend Kurt Kutay, who runs Wildland Adventures (www.wildland.com), to set up the best possible eight days in Costa Rica for a variety of experiences. This was a rare chance for our entire family to be together, and this jungle experience seemed the perfect way for all of us to recreate.

We split our time between two fine hotels: Arenas del Mar in Manuel Antonio had a great restaurant, golf carts to zip guests to and from the beach, and low-key elegance at the gateway to the Manuel Antonio National Park. La Paloma lodge on Drake Bay was extremely remote — a Robinson-Crusoe-wins-the-lottery kind of place — on the Osa Peninsula near the Corcovado National Park. We spent two days with nature guides in the two different parks (and liked Manual Antonio best — more first growth and animal variety). Between all the boogie-boarding in the surf and fruit smoothies, we had lots of exercise. In fact, the week reminded me how fun it is to be physical.

We got to our remote La Paloma lodge on a land rover — fording rivers and jolloping through miles of mammoth potholes past pigs striking piggy poses in mud puddles and humble tin-roof farms. At the end of the road, a boat was waiting to motor us to our lodge. For three days of coming and going, we had a new term: “wet landing” or “dry landing” (almost always wet — hop off the boat and walk through the surf to wherever we were bound).

Half of Costa Rica lives less muggy in its central plain. But we were where it’s maximum muggy. Here on the west coast, things don’t even dry when hung in the sun. The temperature is the same all year. Buildings are constructed with no windows. La Paloma lodge was off the grid, powered by its own generator — no air-con, just fans. Kayaking up the lazy lagoon that creeps mysterious inland from Drake Bay, daydreaming through a plush garden of sticky pistil flowers, learning the art of hammock, munching fresh-baked cookies, openly enjoying a little PDA with tiny lizards, and refining an appreciation of pico de gallo salsa, even a workaholic could be thoroughly on vacation here.

Our kids hiked, flashlights in hand, over the suspension bridge and into the village to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the local gang, while Anne and I hung out in the polished-wood-and-rattan public area of our lodge with the other parents. One by one, each couple turned in. Then, well before midnight, we too succumbed to jungle time as a roar of tiny creatures in the darkness all seemed to sing it’s time for bed. At 2:30, Jackie gently guided Andy home, encouraging him to follow the little circle the flashlight made and digging his shoe out of the mud when stuck.

The adrenaline experience of the trip was doing the Zip Line Canopy Tour — a Costa Rican tourism favorite. A family with a huge plot of jungle strung up platforms high in trees laced together by 13 cables, each 100 to 400 meters apart, as high as 60 meters above the ravines. They now earn a good living giving modern-day Tarzans the thrill of their dreams. With guides clipping us from one cable to the next, we couldn’t have fallen to our deaths if we tried. There were no lessons in nature here…just the smell of burning leather as we’d pull down on the cable with our hand guard to slow each landing. Coursing through the trees, this was thunderclaps of fun.

My favorite day was the “Campesinos Reserve Day” — an all-day hike crossing a Man Who Would Be King-style fantasy suspension bridge (the longest in CR), swimming in pools at the base of tropical waterfalls, accompanied by a farmer on a horse who let me walk and whack with his machete. We dropped in on his extremely remote farmhouse, where his wife ground up sugarcane for a refreshing drink as our kids got to see a family living in perfect tropical mountain simplicity.

Hopping a fast boat, we sped with the flying fish (stopping only for a little whale watching) to the distant Cano Island — a bushy green button in the middle of the Pacific famous for its fine snorkeling. Poking into a swirling school of big-eye fish, analyzing the churning patterns of sunlit bubbles as the surf crashed over the rocks, and marveling at the ability of huge stingrays to disappear into a muddy bottom, we enjoyed another world. During lunch at the island’s ranger station, we spied a crocodile perched still as a rock on a rock, waiting to knock a pelican silly, while six or eight children frolicked nearby in the surf.

The last morning finally arrived. I spent the hour before our departure time mostly face-down on a La Paloma massage table. With the soothing roar of the distant surf rather than New Age music setting the mood, I reviewed a wonderful week in my mind.

Then, wistfully, I strapped my wristwatch back on, and we headed for the airstrip. I mentioned there was no rush, as this was the first time in our lives the plane would wait for us. Jackie said she wanted to take flying lessons. Andy marveled at how he hadn’t held a cell phone in his hand for a week. Anne tidied up her list of 30 or so different birds spotted. And all of us began the day-long return: Drake’s Bay to San José to Houston to Seattle, where I’ll redirect my mind to a land where the flora and fauna is more…European.

Coming up: Our evening with spacey Tracy the bug lady and my attempt at surfing.